Does father know anything?

The relationship between fathers and daughters can be difficult. Just ask King Lear and Cordelia, or almost any father of a teenage girl. The connection between modern fathers and all their children, regardless of gender, can be fraught, and it is not helped by the fact that even now, after a couple generations of feminist calls for reform, the typical Canadian father, according to StatsCan, still spends about half as much time doing childcare as the typical woman does. (In 2010, my gender averaged less than 25 hours a week of childcare, while women put in 50 hours.)

And that’s not because we are taking up a lot of slack on other domestic work. Men in Canada average just over eight hours a week of housework, while women put in nearly 14 hours.

Meanwhile, much of the treatment of fathers and daughters in mass media verges on the saccharine, or in the case of the much-reported Purity Ball movement, in which evangelically oriented fathers and daughters attend a prom type dance at which they publicly pledge to protect the daughter’s virginity and hand it over intact to her husband, crosses all the way over the high sugar line into the grotesque and near pornographic.

Don’t look in The Dad Dialogues, Canadian writers George Bowering and Charles Demers’ new book of correspondence, for any such embarrassing sentiment or morbid obsessions. Bowering, 80, is able to look back on a long, productive career which included a stint as Canada’s first poet laureate and the author of over 80 books. Demers, in his mid-30s, is well launched on a multi-tasking career as a stand up comic, radio star, university prof, novelist, political essayist and playwright. The pair has something far more interesting in mind. ( Full disclosure: Given how small and interwoven the world of Vancouver writers is, I have known both authors a little, Bowering for decades and Demers for years, and I have reviewed earlier works by both.)

These two gifted writers from either end of a long arc of Canadian literary history decided at the urging of Bowering’s wife Jean Baird, to put on paper their conversation about fathering daughters that began when Demers learned that his wife Cara Ng was pregnant with a girl. The talk began in appropriately guy fashion, at a baseball game at Nat Bailey Stadium.

During the remainder of Ng’s pregnancy and the first year of daughter Josephine’s life, Bowering and Demers exchanged intermittent emails in which the older writer reminisced about the birth and early life of his daughter Thea, the two men compared notes about the joys and terrors of learning how to care for an infant, and in the process provided yet more evidence that they know their way around a sentence and a paragraph. This is a relaxed, amiable book, infused with the love the two fathers obviously feel for their daughters and studded with terrifically funny anecdotes of sleepless nights, teething, diaper changes, first steps, first terrifying falls and first words. The authors are virtuosos of charm and both richly display this fragile but valuable trait in their respective letters to each other.

So, there is lots of funny stuff, and lots of tender expressions of fatherly love, which manage to skirt the flanking dangers of Hallmark card/Father Knows Best sentiment on the one hand and ostentatious tough guy posturing on the other. In the middle of this difficult balancing act, they provide the reader with a lot of serious material to think about, ranging from the ethical complexity of bringing a child into a daunting world, the ways that the rigours of child rearing can change and deepen a relationship, or scuttle it, and the always contentious question of whether men can describe themselves as feminists. All in all, they have produced a thoughtful, amusing book, which should spark a lot of conversations across Canada about fathering, daughters, housework and diapers. Not too shabby for a couple of guys firing off notes to each other in the rare moments of spare time that their respective busy lives allowed.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver, where he is, somewhat to his bemusement, a member of an extended family that includes seven children and 18 grandchildren. He welcomes feedback and tips at tos65@telus.net.

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